International Journal of Electrical, Computer, Energetic, Electronic and Communication Engineering Vol:2, No:12, 2008
Power line channel is proposed as an alternative for
broadband data transmission especially in developing countries like
Tanzania [1]. However the channel is affected by stochastic
attenuation and deep notches which can lead to the limitation of
channel capacity and achievable data rate. Various studies have
characterized the channel without giving exactly the maximum
performance and limitation in data transfer rate may be this is due to
complexity of channel modeling being used. In this paper the channel
performance of medium voltage, low voltage and indoor power line
channel is presented. In the investigations orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing (OFDM) with phase shift keying (PSK) as
carrier modulation schemes is considered, for indoor, medium and
low voltage channels with typical ten branches and also Golay
coding is applied for medium voltage channel. From channels,
frequency response deep notches are observed in various frequencies
which can lead to reduce the achievable data rate. However, is
observed that data rate up to 240Mbps is realized for a signal to noise
ratio of about 50dB for indoor and low voltage channels, however for
medium voltage a typical link with ten branches is affected by strong
multipath and coding is required for feasible broadband data transfer